Kickstarter: Check your Blood Alcohol Content with DrinkMate

Australian’s love a drink – but we DON’T love people who drink and drive. As the saying goes ‘Stay under .05 or get off the road’, so making it easy to check your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) is a good way to avoid incidents – or just don’t drink at all – so the team at Edge Tech Labs has started a Kickstarter project for a portable smartphone powered Blood Alcohol Content meter called DrinkMate.

DrinkMate is a microUSB powered attachment for your smartphone which you can blow into and see your Blood Alcohol Content displayed almost immediately on the app on your phone. There’s no need to actually put your mouth to a mouthpiece with DrinkMate, so your friends can use it as well, with no icky sharing issues.

There’s always questions of accuracy with any Breathalyser testing apparatus, and of course the Police units are pretty much the gold standard. Edge Tech Labs has gone to lengths to ensure DrinkMate is accurate though, the accuracy is approximately +/- 0.01% BAC at a BAC of 0.02% with testing and calibration of the units done with kits from Lifeloc Technologies, a leader in breathalyser testing and calibration. The range for BAC goes from 0.00% all the way to 0.20%.

The unit is Android only at this stage, with the team advising they will look at iOS after successfully funding the Android version as iPhone hardware development ‘is much more costly and time consuming than Android development’. There’s guaranteed compatibility with a range of Samsung devices, including the Galaxy S3, S4, and S5 and Note 3. The HTC One, Moto X and Asus Transformer Prime and Infinity have also been tested and found compatible. There’s also beta testing for the Nexus 5 and 7 and Sony Xperia Z1 and Z2 as well, with the hardware found to be compatible – the team is continuing to test with Phones or tablets running Android 3.1 or later with USB host capability possibly Ok.

The project is currently sitting at 975 backers, who’ve contributed US$35,425 of the $40,000 goal, and there’s still 24 days left. You can still grab a DrinkMate for US$25 + US$8 shipping to get it over to Australia when it ships – the team expect December 1st, but being Kickstarter that could be any time. To check out DrinkMate, head over to the Kickstarter project page now.

Like all these projects, we are here to inform not advocate backing the project. All projects on Kickstarter have no guarantee that they’ll end up being produced even if their goal is reached, so please ensure you are aware of all the terms and conditions before you back a project.

Daniel Tyson Editor

Dan is a die-hard Android fan. Some might even call him a lunatic. He's been an Android user since Android was a thing, and if there's a phone that's run Android, chances are he owns it (his Nexus collection is second-to-none) or has used it.

Dan's dedication to Ausdroid is without question, and he has represented us at some of the biggest international events in our industry including Google I/O, Mobile World Congress, CES and IFA.